023 RR Book Club: Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns with Kent Beck

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• What is the rule or pattern?
• Kent said, “I am in terror of not understanding stuff.”
• Learn to feel good about ambiguous situations.
• “Most of the problems being dealt with by programmers are caused by programmers.”
• Programming at its best is an act of empathy.
• “Patterns are what you get when you run out of language.”
• Composed Method
• Double Dispatch
• coerce
• Collection management
• Know your language features
• Ruby and Smalltalk solve common problems.
• Shortcut Method
• Naming patterns
• Question: I recognize some ideas from SBPP in later works by other authors, e.g. I think “Clean Code” by Robert Martin can be seen as the heir to SBPP. Do you agree?
• Question: What’s your opinion about the future of Smalltalk?
• Question: Do you think the latest Smalltalk’s community efforts such as Pharo, Seaside, Amber (previously known as JTalk), etc. could put Smalltalk again in the limelight?
• Question:  Do you think Smalltalk is worth learning by current programmers?
• Objects are just an inch under the class.
• Question: I thought I heard a couple of years ago that you were working on a “Ruby Best Practice Patterns” book with one of the ex-Hashrocket guys. Any truth to this? Any plans for making a ruby version of this book?
• Question: Any chance of an e-book version of SBPP appearing?
• Question: How does he balance between learning new or current things versus going back to old (say more than 10 yrs old) publications?